Foreign Policy Research Institute
A Catalyst for Ideas
by Henry Sokolski
As terrorism became the number-one threat after September
11, policy reviews have become urgent for other threats,
notably the spread of strategic weaponry. Here the need to
make nonproliferation policy more operational is clear.
Where before September 11 nonproliferation experts focused
on what the security implications might be if country X
acquired weapon Y and what should be done to delay or deter
that weapons acquisition or deployment, now the number one
topic is what must be done to defend against a state or
terrorist actually using such weapons. Certainly, with the
near-kiloton equivalent destruction of the New York World
Trade Center, followed by the postal delivery of anthrax-
laced letters, hypothesizing about what countries might do
to proliferate or to curb proliferation has given way to
more concrete concerns.
This shift in emphasis has already manifested itself with
increased attention to at least four issues:
* Enforcement of certain nonproliferation obligations;
* The accounting and monitoring of materials and
dangerous diseases that terrorists or states might steal,
use or spread;
* The military costs of defending sensitive facilities
and materials against possible theft or attack;
* The desirability of having proliferating and terrorist-
supporting regimes change or be changed.
Each of these issues suggests a new direction for
nonproliferation.
ENFORCEMENT
Here, the Bush Administration has already publicly laid down
several markers. The first set came at the November 2001
Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) review conference where
U.S. representative John Bolton identified Iraq, North
Korea, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Sudan as known or probable
violators of the BWC. His comments immediately caused a
stir as to what other nations should be added to the list
(e.g., China and Russia) and what actions, if any, should be
taken to detect and deter such violators.
A week later President Bush laid down a second marker
clarifying which nations he would target beyond Afghanistan
in his war against terrorism. If countries "develop weapons
of mass destruction that will be used to terrorize nations,"
he said, "they will be held accountable." He then urged
both Iraq and North Korea to open themselves up to
international inspections and made it clear that there would
be consequences if they refused.
Notably these remarks come from an administration generally
opposed to negotiating or signing new arms control
agreements. Where previous administrations measured
nonproliferation progress in terms of what new
understandings or agreements had been reached, this
administration is more interested in encouraging adherence
to existing agreements that they deem to be important.
Given the statements of Bush officials, the three agreements
that seem to be of greatest US interest are the BWC, the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the UN Iraq
inspection resolutions. Certainly, the anthrax letter
scare and the possibility of foreign (conceivably Iraqi)
assistance to the attackers helps explain US interest in
securing the objectives of the BWC and the UN resolutions.
Similarly, events after September 11 put the spot light on
the next worst scenario - nuclear terrorism. Conventional
and biological assaults, after all, hardly deterred the US
and its friends from counter attacking. Moreover, Ossama
Bin Laden, aware of our limited defenses against nuclear
weapons (as compared to biological and chemical agents) has
warned the world that he was working to obtain a nuclear or
radiological bomb). Indeed, crude drawings along with
details about such devices recently found at al Qaeda camps
suggest that his claims are more than mere rhetoric.
Of course, whether other nonproliferation agreements will be
deemed critical and how any of these agreements might best
be enforced is still unclear. What is apparent, however, is
that nonproliferation enforcement must receive far more
attention than it has to date.
ACCOUNTING AND MONITORING
As already noted, terrorist threats to use or steal
biological agents and nuclear materials must now be taken
far more seriously. Indeed, unlike traditional chemical
weapons, just a few kilograms of these agents or materials
can inflict enormous harm. This, in turn, increases the
importance of monitoring the spread of dangerous infectious
diseases (to know if and when one has been attacked and to
be able to take timely remedial action) and of accounting
for nuclear weapons usable materials.
With regard to health monitoring, the World Health
Organization (WHO) has been trying for some time to expand
its surveillance coverage. The US representative in Geneva
this fall, in fact, urged members of the BWC to back these
efforts. The problem is that so far, the WHO has only
succeeded in getting its members to agree to monitor three
sicknesses - yellow fever, plague, and cholera. The
reporting it receives, moreover, is generally limited to
information regarding confirmed outbreaks, rather than the
type of preliminary data needed to contain such outbreaks in
a timely fashion. Clearly, to address terrorist attacks
more will need to be done to assure warning of the outbreak
of a vast array of infectious diseases well before they
spread out of control. This, at minimum, will require
nations to advance their own health monitoring systems and
exchange whatever data they gain quickly with others.
As for accounting for nuclear weapons usable materials, the
prospect of nuclear terrorism after September 11 has
prompted several anti-nuclear organizations to underscore
how poor current inventory efforts are. In fact, much needs
to be done. The International Atomic Energy Agency was
established to make sure that significant quantities of
nuclear materials are not diverted from peaceful to military
purposes. Yet, to protect its members proprietary nuclear
interests, the agency interprets its charter as virtually
forbidding it to report on the size, physical state, and
composition of effectively all the nuclear materials it
inspects (since it can only report on material it suspects
is missing or unaccounted for). Such studied inattention
now seems highly inappropriate.
In fact, experts estimate that well over 32,000 crude
nuclear weapons worth of weapons usable plutonium (i.e.,
over 192 tones) has been separated from spent power reactor
fuel and could be stolen or diverted. This, however, is
only an estimate. Meanwhile, the exact amount of weapons
material possessed by smaller nuclear powers, such as,
Israel, India, Pakistan and China is largely unknown. As
for the quantity of Russias military holdings, the only
figure more impressive than the possible total is the
uncertainty surrounding it. Thus, in l999 senior U.S.
Department of Energy officials conceded that US estimates of
Russias military nuclear holdings were only accurate within
(plus or minus) 30 percent. This uncertainty - equivalent
to over 23,000 advanced thermonuclear weapons worth of
material - is, again, unbearably high.
Indeed, last year Mr. Bush cited the 30 percent Russian
uncertainty figure and emphasized that "the next president
must press for an accurate inventory of all this material."
Certainly, after September 11, the need to do so not just
for Russia, but for all nations possessing nuclear weapons
usable materials is much clearer.
DEFENSE COST ANALYSIS
Prior to September 11, nonproliferation debates over the
future of nuclear power and the sharing of strategic weapons
command and control information were dominated by legal and
commercial calculations. Would sharing permissive action
link technology with India violate the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treatys stricture against assisting or
transferring "control over nuclear weapons" to "any
recipient whatsoever"? Would the costs of transporting,
fabricating and using nuclear weapons usable and near-
weapons usable fuels (e.g., highly enriched uranium,
separated plutonium and mixed oxide fuel) in power reactors
be significantly greater than those associated with using
safer low enriched uranium fuels? Would it be cheaper to
dispose of spent reactor fuel directly or to dispose of it
after chemically separating out and reusing the nuclear
weapons usable plutonium it contained? Is it more
economical for power utilities to keep spent reactor fuel
for 20 or more years at the reactor site or to have it
removed to interim or final off-site storage facilities?
Could nuclear power see a revival if new, cheaper reactor
designs were built?
Following the terrorist attacks of September, these
calculations have taken a back seat to assessments of how
great the defense consequences or costs might be of each
alternative. Thus, the debate over sharing command and
control information with new nuclear powers has shifted away
from legal concerns to whether or not such assistance might
actually undermine international security by making the
recipient more inclined to build and field larger numbers of
strategic weapons (a point privately raised by senior Indian
military officials).
Similarly, a series of post September 11 developments has
altered the debate over nuclear power. It was discovered,
for example, that the US-based al Qeada agents who inquired
about the availability of crop dusters also wanted specifics
on the location of two U.S. reactors and that al Qeada had
mapped the location of all of Europes nuclear power
stations. Also, shortly after the New York World Trade
Center attack, The French government became concerned about
the vulnerability of its reprocessing facility at La Hague
and circled it with anti-aircraft batteries. Then, the very
week of the September attacks, American environmentalists
opposed to fashioning surplus U.S. military plutonium into
mixed oxide fuel and burning it in civilian reactors
appealed a now questionable U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission finding (released September 12th) that terrorist
threats against this materials transport and fabrication
were insignificant. Shortly thereafter, Congressional
nuclear power critics began highlighting just how vulnerable
nuclear power plants are to air attacks against their spent
fuel storage ponds and power supply and cooling systems.
Each of these developments has prompted questions as to
whether one or another dimension of nuclear power can be
adequately secured by deploying either air defenses or
military guards at nuclear facilities or by hardening them
further against attack. Clearly, more analysis will be
needed to answer these questions and to determine whether it
makes sense to try to secure these nuclear activities and
materials or instead to curtail them or their production.
CHANGING REGIMES
Finally, efforts to topple the Taliban regime and President
Bushs recent expansion of his anti-terrorism war to nations
acquiring weapons of mass destruction that might use them to
terrorize other nations raise the thorny question of regime
change. Certainly, before September 11, nonproliferation
diplomacy strained publicly to treat all nations, including
the worst proliferators, as though they were or could (with
manageable effort) become accepted members of the
international community.
Now, such diplomacy seems less plausible. In fact, there
currently is open government debate regarding the need to
threaten Saddams regime to eliminate the threat posed by
his strategic weapons programs. This discussion comes,
moreover, on the heels of concerns expressed during the
first weeks of the war that Pakistans government might be
overthrown and its nuclear arsenal seized by Taliban
sympathizers. As such, the stability and nature of regimes
and the need to shore up or possibly change them are matters
that proponents of nonproliferation will now have to address
much more explicitly.
POST 911 NONPROLIFERATION
by Henry Sokolski
January 25, 2002
Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation
Policy Education Center in Washington, DC. He served as
Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy in the Pentagon in the
first Bush Administration. Sokolski also participated in
FPRIs Defense Task Force assessing U.S. military
capabilities in the post-Cold War era. FPRIs task force
has published its findings in a newly released book entitled
"America the Vulnerable: Our Military Problems and How To
Fix Them" (available at www.fpri.org).
POST 911 NONPROLIFERATION
by Henry Sokolski

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